A NATION CHALLENGED: THE CONVERT; U.S. Hopes American Taliban Will Tell All

John Walker Lindh, the 20-year-old American who was captured with Taliban soldiers in northern Afghanistan, could provide a bounty of useful intelligence about the recruiting methods, hide-outs, supply routes and lower-level command structure of the Taliban military, senior Pentagon officials said today.

The officials said American Special Forces troops were holding Mr. Walker, who goes by his mother's last name. They said he was being treated for a variety of injuries, somewhere near Mazar-i-Sharif.

[In Afghanistan, Syed Wasiqullah, a Northern Alliance officer in Mazar-i-Sharif, said the American had fought with Al Qaeda in Kabul and Kandahar, but that he had been taken out of the country. He indicated with a hand gesture that Mr. Walker was eccentric.]

The Pentagon officials said Americans had conducted preliminary interviews with him, but declined to say whether the questioning was being supervised by the military or by intelligence officers. Officials would not say whether Mr. Walker was cooperating.

Mr. Walker, a convert to Islam who has been in Afghanistan only since May, according to his parents, is thought to have been a lowly foot soldier in the Taliban's ragtag army and is not believed to know much about the whereabouts or movements of senior leaders.

But as one of the thousands of young men who were recruited by the Taliban from religious schools, mosques and other institutions in Pakistan, Mr. Walker could help American investigators understand the international network that has funneled Islamic fighters into Afghanistan.

One senior military official said the Pentagon was particularly interested in knowing where Mr. Walker first made contact with the Taliban.

If it was a mosque, for instance, investigators would want to know whether religious teachers were actively involved in recruitment.

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During a television interview that has been broadcast on CNN, Mr. Walker said he had first met people connected with the Taliban while he was studying Islam in northwestern Pakistan, but offered few details.

''The people there in general have a great love for the Taliban,'' Mr. Walker said. ''So I started to read some of the literature of the scholars and of the history of the movement and just thought, my heart became attached to them.''

The senior military official also said Mr. Walker might be able to explain some of the basic operations of the Taliban military. Do they pay bonuses to their recruits? Where did they get their training, and from whom? What routes did they use to move between Pakistan and Afghanistan? Did they use caves and tunnels as barracks, command and control centers or storage depots?

As American military officials pondered what information they could glean from Mr. Walker, lawyers were still studying what kind of legal case, if any, could be brought against him. His parents, who live in northern California, said they had hired a lawyer to represent him.

On Monday a senior Bush administration official said Mr. Walker probably could not be tried before a military tribunal unless he was first stripped of his citizenship. But government lawyers and legal experts have said Mr. Walker can still face an array of criminal charges, including treason.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that the administration had not decided how to handle Mr. Walker's case. Asked if he considered the young man a traitor, Mr. Rumsfeld chose his words carefully. ''I am not a lawyer,'' he said. ''There are a lot of words that people have for different categories of human beings that depend on their behavior.''